Surfaced

Surfaced

I’m drying my hair when I notice it.

I’m juggling hairdryer and hand-mirror, trying to get the
awkward bit at the back that never quite dries and always goes frizzy, when I
get a flash of shoulder. My skin is smooth, unblemished except for a faint tan
line, still fading from last summer. I frown and switch off the dryer.

“Babe,” I say.

No answer.

“Babe. Matt.”

It takes him a second, but he peels himself away from the
computer and gives a grunt that I choose to interpret as ‘What’s wrong?’

“Look at that.” I turn my back to him, holding my hair out
of the way. Water trickles down my neck.

Matt cocks his head. “What am I looking at?”

“That.”

He looks at me blankly. I sigh.

“I used to have a mole. Right there.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. You made up a little poem about it once. When we
started going out. You don’t remember? There
was a little girl and she had a little mole, right in the middle of her
shoulder…” I trail off. “Never mind.”

“I don’t think they do that,” I say, but he isn’t looking at
me anymore.

*

“Thought you were meeting Jane after work.”

“Yeah, well.” I plonk my Tesco bag down on the kitchen
table, probably harder than I need to. “I was. She cancelled. At quarter to
six. Again.” I pull off my jacket and throw it at the peg in the hallway. It
lands on the floor in a heap, and I have to stoop to pick it up.

“Bitch,” Matt says, without much feeling, and flips the
channel on the telly.

“I’m going for a bath,” I tell Matt. “If you’re phoning for
Chinese, can you get me beef chow mein?”

He nods, but I suspect I’ll still end up with chicken.

I run the bath and sit in it until the water’s tepid and my
fingers start to prune. Then I get into my pyjamas and grab a bottle of nail
varnish. Don’t normally bother with this kind of primping on a weeknight, but
I’m still pissed off, and there’s something soothing about painting my nails. Making
sure everything’s neat and bright, tropical green or sunshine yellow, glossy
and uniform as plastic.

In the living room, I hear Matt on the phone. “Yeah, that’s
right,” he says to the woman in the Hoi Nam. “One crispy beef, one chicken chow
mein. Brilliant.”

*

It takes another two cancellations before I get around to
meeting Jane, in a Starbucks at the far end of town after work. I’m staring
into my vanilla latte; Jane’s still going strong into the eighth minute of her
rant about what a tosser her new manager is. It doesn’t require much
participation from me, really—just the occasional nod or “Yeah, I can’t believe
him.”

I swirl my coffee with the wooden stirrer, lift the cup in
both hands. I’m about to put it my mouth when I notice.

My nails are chipped—starting to look a bit too Courtney
Love for the office, really. Apart from the one on my right index finger.
Because that one—it’s gone.

Not gone as in, pulled out. There’s no blood—plus, I think I
would’ve noticed the excruciating pain. There’s just soft skin where it used to
be. No nail bed, no cuticle, no nothing.

I put down my coffee and hold my finger up in front of my
face. It’s shiny, like scar tissue.

“Are you listening?” says Jane.

I blink. “Uh,” I say. “He nicked your parking space?”

“Right.” Jane frowns. “And don’t get me started on that
meeting yesterday morning—”

But I’ve tuned her out. I’m still looking at the back of my
finger—same as the front, only minus the fingerprint. I’m holding it right in
her eye line, and she hasn’t even noticed.

Maybe I’m going nuts.

Seems unlikely, though. Too dramatic. That sort of thing
doesn’t happen to people like me.

Maybe I’m just going.

The thought pops into my head all of a sudden, as though it
doesn’t belong to me. I shiver, and pull the sleeves of my cardigan down over
my hands. Jane is still talking.

*

It’s my ear piercings, next. I’m talking to Mum, mobile
phone pressed between my ear and my shoulder, fumbling in my jewellery box. I
pull out a pair of amber drops in simple silver settings. Present from Carl, my
brother, a few birthdays ago, though I’m pretty sure his wife Abbie picked them
out. The colour’s rich, honey and sunlight and sepia. I’ve seen pictures of
insects trapped in amber, though, and when I first unwrapped them—after I’d said
‘thank you’ and ‘ooh, aren’t they pretty’, of course—I held them up to the
light, searching for a stray scrap of gossamer wing.

I haven’t worn them in years. Nobody noticed when I did.

In my ear, Mum’s saying something about can I go to Tesco on
the way over to her house, and she’ll text me the shopping list, and if I could
pop in the pet shop and get some dog food for Raffles that’d be great, and
could I get Carl to phone her, only she hasn’t heard from him in ages and she’s
starting to get worried.

I roll my eyes. Of course she hasn’t heard from Carl. He’s
busy in London, with his fancy job and his fancy flat and his
lawyer-who-looks-like-a-model wife. Nobody expects
him to call.

“It’s not too much trouble, is it?” she says, anxiously.

“Of course I’ll bloody do it!” I snap back. “I always do,
don’t I?”

I feel bad right away.

I’m still pissed off at Matt for ignoring the fingernail
incident. He tried to convince me I must’ve ripped it out without noticing, and
when I wouldn’t shut up about it he eventually shrugged and muttered, “Yeah,
maybe you should phone the doctor.” I knew there was no point telling him he’d
upset me, though. I’d be lucky to get another shrug.

Still. No excuse to go around snapping at other people.

I tilt the mirror up to put in my earrings. “Sorry, Mum,” I
say. “I’m just a bit—”

I trail off. My ear piercings—they’re gone. Not just closed
up, like when you don’t put anything in them for ages. That still leaves a
little dent in the skin. No, they’re just absent, like they were never there.
Even the scar from my first, ill-fated attempt at piercing them with a safety
pin when I was thirteen has disappeared.

“Are you alright, dear?” Mum asks.

“I. Yeah.” I swallow. “I’ll see you later.”

I hang up the phone, and before I’m even conscious of having
moved, I’m in the bathroom, dry-heaving over the sink, tears pricking at my
eyes. Bile raises in my throat, but nothing comes up.

I stay there for a minute, maybe longer. My eyes are sore;
my throat burns. I lift my head to look in the mirror above the sink, but my
face looks the same as it did last night. It’s just the ears.

I sift through my memories. The first time, with the safety
pin. A sleepover in Kelly Richards’ living room. Early hours, dizzy from sugar
overload and a single passed-round bottle of WKD Blue. We light a candle and
use the flame to sterilise the pins, and then we take turns. My ear won’t stop
bleeding, and in the morning we scrub the pillowcase in the bathroom sink,
frantically trying to get the blood out before Kelly’s mum notices.

The second time I get them done, I’m sitting in a branch of
Claire’s Accessories with my first boyfriend, Stu, at my side, holding his hand
in a deathgrip. It’s our three-week anniversary, and he’s bought me a pair of
tiny, gold, heart-shaped studs. Three weeks later, he’ll dump me for Shauna
Thomas, who sings in a covers band and gets away with wearing lipstick and
three-inch heels to school, but right now we’re in love. I blink as the girl
squeezes the piercing gun and the stud shoots in—but it hardly hurts at all,
and then it’s done. The weight of the earrings feels strange, though. It
changes how I hold my head, makes my hand keep creeping up to touch my
earlobes. I feel different, transformed by the little hearts and the way Stu
looks at me.

The third time, I’m wandering through town, navigating the
lunchtime crowds in a daze with my phone clutched to my chest. Dad. Heart
attack. Nothing they could do. I keep expecting the screen to light up, someone
from the hospital calling back to tell me it was all a mistake. It’s entirely
by chance that I end up leaning against the front window of the piercing place,
and I haven’t bothered with earrings in years. I’m not sure what makes me go in.
Whether I’m trying to pin myself to reality, or to something else. Sitting
round the table in Mum’s house, later, Abbie’s the only one who notices I’ve
had them done. She raises her eyebrows and doesn’t say anything, and six months
later, she buys me earrings.

I’m still staring in the mirror. The memories are still
here, but the evidence of them is gone. My face is pale, red around the eyes.

I splash water on it. I contemplate calling in sick to work,
but just the thought of picking up the phone leaves me exhausted. I go back to
bed.

*

The rest of my fingernails go, after that. One by one, at
first; the last two on the same day. After the first couple, I stop telling
Matt about it. I never do get around to making a doctor’s appointment.

I don’t tell Matt when the mole on the back of my wrist
disappears, either, or the scar on my thigh from when I was seven and fell off
my bike into next door’s rose bushes. He doesn’t notice they’re gone; but then,
we haven’t touched in months.

I stop phoning Jane to ask if she wants to meet up for
coffee, and she never calls me. Eventually, my boss phones, and I mumble
something about a stomach bug that I can’t even remember after she hangs up.

I’m sitting by the window, staring at the lines on the back
of my hands and wondering if they’re starting to fade, when it occurs to me I
haven’t left the flat in a week.

There are three missed calls on my phone, all from Mum. I
listen to the voicemails first, starting with Could you phone the dentist and make an appointment for me? I just
don’t understand that silly new automated system they’ve got, and finishing
with, Is everything alright? You’d tell
me if something happened, wouldn’t you?

I press the ‘call’ button. The smudge my fingertip leaves on
the touchscreen reassures me.

Mum picks up after two rings. “Is everything alright?” she
says. “I’ve been going frantic over here.” She sounds breathless; I think I
might actually believe her.

I should tell her what’s happening. Somehow, though, I can’t
get the words out. “Oh, you know,” I say, instead. “Not been feeling very
well.”

“Oh, dear,” she says. “Is it that ‘flu that’s been going
around? Pat was laid up for two weeks.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Must be.”

*

I wake up two days later and find my left eyebrow missing.
There’s no stubble where it used to be. The skin is smooth and poreless. I look
alien, and faintly surprised.

I’m out of milk and cornflakes—I’m going to have to go to
the shop. But I can’t leave the flat like this, so I shave off the other one
and draw them both back on with eyeliner pencil. I’m trying to find Matt, to
ask him if he thinks it looks weird, when I realise he isn’t in the flat.

His laptop’s gone, and I don’t remember hearing him get into
bed last night. I don’t remember the last time we did sleep side-by-side, come to think of it. I try to remember if
we argued, if I said things I should be regretting now. If he mentioned
anything about having to go away for work. Nothing comes back to me.

I should be frantic, shouldn’t I? I should be phoning around
everyone I know, maybe even the police.

But I’m not. It occurs to me, in a roundabout kind of a way,
that maybe he was never here. Maybe I just made him up.

I think about it for a moment longer, and then I go to buy
milk.

*

On my way back into the flat, I notice the light on the
landline blinking. Five new answerphone messages. I should listen to them, but
the thought feels unutterably heavy.

I delete them all instead.

*

I wake up and the world is flat.

It’s disorienting, and when I reach out to grab my phone I
miss and knock a cold cup of tea off the bedside table. My carpet’s light blue;
it’s bound to stain. I swear and scramble out of bed, into the bathroom to grab
a wad of toilet paper.

That’s when I catch sight of my face in the bathroom mirror.

Its smooth, unblemished skin; its wide blue eye.

Just the one.

I stare. I stare, and then I stumble back into the bedroom
and curl up in the foetal position and clutch handfuls of my hair.

I should call somebody. Mum, a doctor, Matt—at least if he
answers, I’ll know he was real. I reach for the phone.

Somehow, the morning I wake to darkness isn’t a surprise. I
touch my face, where my eyes used to be. There’s nothing there but skin, smooth
and taut like fabric stretched over a frame.

I feel my way around the room using my fingertips and duck
under the curtain to stand by the window. I can’t see the light, but I’m drawn
to it anyway. Perhaps I am turning into a plant.

A plant, or a deep-sea creature. There are fish in the
depths of the ocean who’ve lived without light for so many generations that
their eyes have atrophied. They swim around in the cold dark, and they don’t
even know that it’s cold, or that it’s dark.

I remember reading about it in one of the nature books in
the school library, staring at the pictures of their blind eyes and their great
yawning needle-toothed mouths. I used to be interested in things like that when
I was small, when the world was big and strange.

A sound shatters the silence. It’s my phone ringing. I turn
away from the window and fumble for it, but I’m too late to pick up the call,
and I can’t see the screen to find out who it was. I run my fingers over the
screen, as though I could read it by touch alone.

I wonder if I still have fingerprints.

I wait for the phone to ring again.

It doesn’t. Eventually, I go back to the window.

I wonder what people passing in the street will think of the
eyeless girl on the first floor. If they’ll mistake me for a mannequin, a
Halloween mask. If they’ll see me at all.

*

There’s a tap at the door. Voices outside. I hear them as
though I’m underwater. They sound distorted, further away than I know they are.

“Maybe she went on holiday?”

It’s a man’s voice. Someone I know, I think, but I can’t put
a name to it. Mark? Martin? I want to call out to him. I open my mouth—

I don’t open my mouth.

I have no mouth. I make a sound somewhere in my throat; a
low, dying-animal sound.

Another voice answers him. “Could be. Look at all the post
in the hallway—she’s obviously not here.”

I get to my feet and shuffle towards the door. The voices
are growing quieter. Footsteps recede down the corridor. I scrabble at the
doorknob but can’t grasp it. My fingers feel stiff, as though the joints have
fused together.

The thought distracts me; and as the voices fade away, I
can’t remember why I wanted to speak to them.

*

There is a long silence.

After a while, I find my way back to the window. I move
slowly, my legs heavy. When I get to the window, I rest my cheek against the
cool glass of the pane, and it feels like home.

I can’t tell if there’s anybody in the street, if anybody
sees me.

The phone doesn’t ring. Nobody else comes to the door.

It occurs to me, in a roundabout kind of a way, that maybe I
was never here.

Write a Review
Did you enjoy my story? Please let me know what you think by leaving a review! Thanks,
Jessica George

William Elliott Kern:
Long story, the plot uncovered midway through the story. From beginning, the story was fast moving. Then dragged on for quite some time. The Author was good in describing her characters, their clothing, etc. but a lot of that disclosure distracted from the story moving fast.Not withstanding, the...

Tony Hyde:
This was a great book!It was a crazy ride to an insane ending! It kept me at the edge of my seat.I enjoyed the three timelines and how they brought the story to a fantastic peak near the end!If you like suspense with lots of twists and turns than this book is for you!

Lacey Eder:
The stories remind me of the chilling 2 sentence stories on Reddit. Creepy, but not too scary and short. There were a couple of spelling errors throughout, which probably should've been taken care of beforehand. But, if this were available on Kindle Unlimited for $1-5, I'd consider buying it then.

Nishant Jain:
I felt as if i am watching a movie,not reading a book. The story was definitely interesting. It was more of action than horror for me. There are a few grammatical and spelling errors I came across and at times I found it difficult to imagine some things which the author is trying to convey, but o...

Andrea Norton:
This story was so well put together. It was suspenseful, the storyline flowed perfectly and it was full of interesting twists and turns. I found myself getting very involved in the story and read it in just a few hours. I'd really like to read more of this author's work!

iann4701:
I'm no expert but I know when I have read a good book and this was one. From the beginning it had me wondering where it was going next and what the outcome would be. If you fancy a read with a slightly different perspective from the norm then I would certainly give this book a read. I will look o...

debmart6901:
I could not put this story down. I stayed up reading when I should have been in bed. could not get enough, could not wait to find how it ended. Great story telling. Great detail. Loved it. The characters were very vivid.

Juzme34:
Once I started reading I didn't want to stop. A few minor grammatical errors caught my attention, but a quick edit can fix those. I found the main character's view interesting, and her thinking process a bit odd. Yet it was easy to follow her train of thought. The story ends with the reader wanti...

danijelstoilkovic:
I really like this story. The characters, the mysteries, that bonding in the end, but I would really like to see what happened next. Is there a second part? And this would really be one cool horror movie and if I was the director, I wouldn't change a thing.It's awesome!

Tony Lee:
Great ideas. Some mistakes here and there, but not too much to break the immersion :) This was my second book here, and I'm pretty satisfied! Well I can't think of anything else to write so I'm just gonna fill the space up with random words. Magazine holder sidney sheldon first bible shack tom ha...

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